SAPPHO

flourished c. 610, c. 580 BC, Lesbos, Asia Minor Sappho of Lesbos, from a Pompeiian fresco; in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. also spelled Psappho celebrated lyric poet greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing. She is said to exceed all other poets, except Archilochus and Alcaeus, in the history of Greek literature in entering into a close personal relation with the reader. Her vocabulary, like her dialect, is for the most part vernacular, not literary. Her phrasing is concise, direct, and picturesque. She has the power of standing aloof and critically judging her own ecstasies and pains; but her emotions lose nothing of their force by being recollected in comparative tranquillity. Sappho is said to have been married to Cercolas, a wealthy man from the island Andros. The tradition that she was banished with other aristocrats and went to Sicily for a time is likely to be true; most of her life, however, was spent at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Her themes are invariably personalprimarily concerned with her friendships and enmities with other womenalthough her brother Charaxus was the subject of several poems. There are, in her work, only a few apparent allusions to the political disturbances of the time, which are so frequently reflected in the verse of her contemporary Alcaeus. It was the fashion in Lesbos at this time for women of good family to assemble in informal societies and spend their days in idle, graceful pleasures, especially in the composition and recitation of poetry. Sappho, the leading spirit of one of these associations, attracted a number of admirers, some from distant places. The principal themes of her poetry are the loves and jealousies and hates that flourished in that sultry atmosphere. Rival associations are fiercely or contemptuously attacked. For other women, usually nameless, Sappho expresses her feelings in terms that range from gentle affection to passionate love. Ancient writers over a period of time, having a large volume of her work in front of them, alleged that Sappho was a lesbian. Her poetry shows that she entertained emotions stronger than mere friendship toward other women, but nothing in what is extant connects her or her companions with homosexual practices. It is not known how her poems were published and circulated in her own lifetime and for the following three or four centuries. In the era of Alexandrian scholarship (especially the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC), what remained of her work was collected and republished in a standard edition of nine books of lyrical verse and one of elegiac. This edition did not survive the early Middle Ages. By the 8th or 9th century AD Sappho was represented only by quotations in other authors. Only one poem, 28 lines long, was complete. The next longest was 16 lines. Since 1898 these fragments have been greatly increased by papyrus finds, though no complete poem has been recovered and nothing equal in quality to the two longer pieces preserved in quotations.